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It was the stuff of nightmares for workers at Cairo's Egyptian Museum when they broke the beard off Tutankhamun's death mask while changing a light bulb. One rushed repair job and over 13 months later, German specialists have been asked to step in and lend a hand.

When a light bulb blew in the cabinet housing Tutankhamun's death mask in August 2014, museum workers knew they had a tricky job ahead of them.

The 12-kilogram mask of Egypt's most famous pharaoh was carefully removed, the bulb changed and the mask brought back.

“They tried to fix it overnight with the wrong material, but it wasn’t fixed in the right way so the next day, very early, they tried to fix it again;" one museum official told the Guardian in January.

“The problem was that they tried to fix it in half an hour and it should have taken them days.”

Museum director Mahmoud el-Halwagy denied the claims, telling Guardian that nothing had happened to the beard – and that curators in previous years must have applied the adhesive as a precaution to make sure it stayed in place.

Either way, the result was far too conspicuous – so German specialists have been drafted in to examine the mask and see how far it can be restored.